The complex interaction of the factors associated with foot blisters, minor wounds, chafe wounds and skin breakdown in general, creates a technological challenge: how to design dressings that provide adequate mechanical stability while protecting the soft tissues from trauma and where the skin has already undergone trauma, providing an appropriate therapeutic environment. It has been recognised that the construction of an appropriate dressing ideally will provide for an interface with the traumatised or non-traumatised skin which is soft and elastic and interface with the external environment, for examples clothes and shoes, which has good slip properties, i.e. a low coefficient of friction. Examples of dressings that address the interfacing problems can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,727,402 assigned to Beisdorf A G and U.S. Pat. No. 5,643,187 assigned to Coloplast A/S. Both of these documents describe that the external interfacing layer can be of a harder material than the skin-interfacing layer. The combination of the two layers with different hardness results in dressings with improved sliding properties. U.S. Pat. No. 5,643,187 teaches that the outer hard layer should be less than 10 microns (μm) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,727,402 teaches that the outer layer should be greater than 10 microns (μm). The hardness of a material may be determined by the Shore or Durometer scales according to, for example, the ASTM method D2240.
Whilst U.S. Pat. No. 5,643,187 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,727,402 represent improvements on the prior art, there is still a need for improved, economic, easy-to-manufacture dressings that address the technological design challenges presented by the different needs of the two interfaces.
The present invention as described below provides at least an alternative, optionally an improved, dressing over one or more of those disclosed in the prior art. The present invention may overcome or mitigate at least one or more problems associated with the dressings of the prior art.